Before we went away, we thought we were done with the demo/clean up and ready to start putting it all back together again. We returned to discover that there was more to dispose of along with a plethora of mouse poop that keeps appearing from all the nooks and crannies (John made a discovery of perfectly sized mouse holes–were they initially for ventilation?–running all along the area where the ceiling meets the walls…perfection).

Anyway, aside from the bathroom that needs to be done by the end of July, is all the painting, plywood installation and kitchen frustration (aka putting together Ikea cabinets). So a couple of weeks ago John and I headed up north and directly to Home Depot with optimism. We decided that we were going to rent a paint sprayer and get going on all that painting. At $115/day, it’s pretty pricey but we were feeling good. So off we trundled to the cottage to get going on the job. Not. We both got inside the cottage and took a real hard look around and realized that we had an awful lot more prep work to be done than we thought. So we got to work (miserably) and about 30 minutes in we regrouped and decided that this scenario was not working for us. It’s not that we’re lazy, it was just so incredibly overwhelming! On top of that, John realized that painting the exposed ceilings in the bedrooms and kitchen wasn’t necessarily going to equal a gorgeous looking space. It looked busy and it wasn’t intended to ever be exposed so it’s not the best construction. We’ve since decided to cover the low ceilings with plywood (which we were going to do anyway on some key walls). That saves us from preparing and painting the low ceilings, but we still have to install the heavy plywood boards. Argh!

So after all that we rushed the unused sprayer back to the tool rental department. The guys were super nice and didn’t charge us for the 2 hours we had the machine and we returned to the cottage on much happier terms. That said, nothing really got accomplished over the last two visits except for some cleaning up and prep work.

So….this past week we finally made some progress. We hired a (human) paint sprayer and after two hours of assisted prep and about an hour of spraying…

Voila! So different (yet still a mess). Of course, the cedar was a lovely colour but not in the best shape.